The Buddha

This painting takes us to an esoteric place, where the character of the Buddha walks in a dreamy landscape. As the Buddha is depicted on the left side in the middle ground, the subject of the picture is not that clear: the Buddha or the landscape?

The Buddha has closed his eyes, which means he doesn’t see the world, but rather focuses on the inside of himself. The landscape is blurry as if we were in the vision of the Buddha, or in a world he muses. Pastel allows Odilon Redon to reach this spiritual dimension of the subject through fuzziness. The French painter draws a fathomless beauty coming from the inside. That is the point of the French Symbolist aesthetic, an artistic movement that stems from literary symbolism. Odilon Redon depicts religious and poetic subjects, letting us see a mystical, symbolic world. This pastel is decorative; we can only imagine which part is real and which is fantasy. Buddha, just as Redon’s painting, chooses a different path to grasp the world.

- Coraline Méric

P.S. Dive into the Odilon Redon’s noir world of darkness here!